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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24114808">one million rooms &amp; one million vacancies</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/tothemoon/pseuds/tothemoon'>tothemoon</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Haikyuu!!</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canon Era, Character Study, Coming of Age, Gen, spoilers for chapter 392 kinda</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-03 01:35:59</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>919</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24114808</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/tothemoon/pseuds/tothemoon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A lesson on filling rooms, brought to you by Bokuto Koutarou.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Akaashi Keiji &amp; Bokuto Koutarou, Bokuto Koutarou &amp; Konoha Akinori</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>36</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>256</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>one million rooms &amp; one million vacancies</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>im sorry lmao</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1">To build a skyscraper, one must remember the walls, too. How walls make rooms, and how rooms hold the expectation of greater things inside. One room says ‘win that practice game,’ while the other says, ‘be the best ace, better than top five.’ The building is coming along quite nicely, people think, and it is, on good days — but no one ever stops to consider: more walls means more rooms, with space to fill and floors to climb.</p><p class="p1">Bokuto Koutarou trudges all the way up to the top of Tokyo Tower, following a three-set loss in his first spring tournament. He is fifteen, legs burning, when he loses count of the steps and floors he's taken to the top. He’d come here to scream, maybe, but now he can barely remember his name and the feel of the ball against his hands. Bokuto keeps on, anyway. When he reaches the top, he looks out over the city for a few moments, body heavy by the tons.</p><p class="p1">Out on the sidewalk, Konoha waits. He sighs out in a big hum, as if he'd come here solely to exhale for the both of them.</p><p class="p1">“Don’t quit now,” he says. “The physical therapists are still waiting back at the gym. Did you even stretch properly?”</p><p class="p1">Bokuto follows, and feels his back straighten with every step on the concrete. Funny, he thinks, the feeling of the ground floor — how it lets his feet bound up, forward, despite the weight of his own making.</p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><hr/><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1">Fill the rooms: with back flips, and batting cage matches, and practice matches, and real matches, with straight shots, and cross shots, then final shots, to seal the games and all the games after that. Fill all those rooms up, then move on to the next floor. Then when you fill those floors, build another. And another. Then another. Let's never stop moving. Until it's not just a matter of fifth best ace, or the fourth, or the third.</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Will I ever be the first thing you see in the sky?</em>
</p><p class="p1">Then, and then, and then, and then. Those and’s and then’s all follow each other in endless motion. Bokuto never sees them, or hears them, he just knows; he just builds as he’s told, in pursuit of those and’s and then’s, shuffling between rooms without looking out the windows he's made from holes in the walls.</p><p class="p1">“Bokuto-san,” Akaashi calls one day. His voice, never above a certain volume, still finds a way to rise up to a second floor classroom, through a window barely cracked open. Bokuto has taken to sulking at his desk today, following five botched cross-shots during practice and the worst somersault he’s ever attempted on the grass.</p><p class="p1">Bokuto barely lifts his head. Akaashi raises his, to call him again. “Bokuto-san, if you're going to stay up there, open the window more. The air is good for you.”</p><p class="p1">When Bokuto doesn't do as he's told, Akaashi walks back into the building. He shows up not five minutes later, door sliding behind him, a world alone for them to share. The first thing Akaashi does is not take a seat, or reprimand; “Bokuto-san,” he just says again, and Bokuto finds some will to raise his chin off the desk.</p><p class="p1">A setter’s hands yank an old window open, letting in new air. Akaashi stays, if only to inhale, and Bokuto remembers to breathe again, too.</p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><hr/><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1">
  <em>Will I ever be the first thing you see in the sky?</em>
</p><p class="p1"><em>I don't know about that</em>, the air says. <em>But I can least meet you, where you are.</em></p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><hr/><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1">By his third year, Bokuto has seen stratospheres. The skyscraper rises the highest it's ever been, almost to the clouds, with rooms old and new and lined across his mind. The old ones, locked by <em>bygones will be bygones,</em> sit as testaments to things forgiven, and then forgotten. By the time he's eighteen, he knows to make peace: with the fact he will never beat the baseball captain in the batting cages; with his mediocre math grades; with back-flips that he’ll never hit one hundred percent of the time.</p><p class="p1">Up and up he goes. Past qualifying rounds, and semi-final battles. The old rooms stay locked, while the new ones creak their doors open. They ask to be filled in small voices, almost lost under the roar of a stadium and teammates yelling, <em>KEEP THE BALL ALIVE</em>.</p><p class="p1">And so they do. And so Bokuto does. He feels the ball come against his hands, a certainty, before slamming it down on the other side.</p><p class="p1">The roaring crowd tells him everything he needs to know. When Bokuto raises his arms in the air, he keeps his chest open like he's got a million rooms with a million new vacancies.</p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><hr/><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1">"Don't quit now," Konoha tells him, when the top for them is a second place finish on the nationals stage. </p><p class="p1">This, Bokuto thinks, is a room he'll leave open forever.</p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><hr/><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p1">“What is the height of the world’s tallest building?”</p><p class="p1">Years later, a game show host asks Bokuto this in front of a live studio audience. He knows he doesn't know. He knows it is an answer he will never know, not in exact numbers, because what does it matter, when they all get to share the sky?</p><p class="p1">“Who cares!” Bokuto answers. The other Jackals, notably Atsumu, stare at him in horror. “Who cares, when they get to be that high!”</p><p class="p1">The audience laughs, not at him, never at him.</p><p class="p1">They understand, and a few even remember to exhale.</p><p class="p2"> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>this is my response to the new chapter because ive never felt so seen in my entire life. help me</p><p>twitter: @sixthmoons</p></blockquote></div></div>
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